“[T]he dependence of human culture on revenge and victimage is too fundamental not to survice the elimination of the most grossly physical forms of violence, the actual murder of the victim. If the Judeo-Christian ferment is not dead, it must be engaged in an obscure struggle against deeper and deeper layers of the essential complicity …
The Pale Galilean Still Conquers
“Max Weber’s interpretation is rooted in Nietzsche’s reading of Judeo-Christianity as the resentment (ressentiment) of the weak against the strong, the slaves against their masters, the victims against their persecutors. The literal madness of Nietzsche’s attitude is that, close as he was to recognizing the truth of human culture, he willfully espoused its lie. He …
When Cartharsis Is Not the Main Point
“Irony is not demonstrable, I repeat, and it should not be, otherwise it would disturb the catharsis of those who enjoy the play at the cathartic level only. Irony is anticathartic. Irony is experience in a flash of complicity with the writer at his most subtle, against the larger part of the audience that remains …
Far More, Actually
“The whole modern dogma of the absolute separation between great poetry and intelligence is one of the consequences of our blindness to the role of mimetic desire and victimage in great literature. The ultimate implications of Julius Caesar seem almost too dangerous to pursue. Our own rationality cannot teach the founding role of mimetic victimage …
Few Understand the Potency of Theater
“At their most radical and pessimistic, all great playwrights, including Moliere and Racine, have more affinity for the enemies of the theater than for its pious friends. Their implacable genius rejects the self-serving platitudes of cultural idolatry. Great theater has never flourished except in periods when it was distrusted and ostracized” (Girard, A Theater of …
Where You Been?
Ed Iverson is one of NSA’s faculty members and serves as the librarian of our Tyndale Library. In addition to these duties, as well as being a gracious Christian gentleman, he also writes a periodic column for the Moscow/Pullman Daily News. But the ongoing reaction to his column by our local lefties resembles a series …
Yay. More Troops.
I just finished looking over the premier issue of Salvo, and I commend it to you. A quarterly dedicated to a thoughtful engagement with the cultural follies that surround us on every side, this magazine is a welcome battalion of reinforcements in the culture wars. Check it out.
Allah and YHWH
One of my Greyfriars students has written helpfully to me, pointing out yet another implication of the Federal Vision trajectory, to wit, my agreement with Pope Benedict on the fact that YHWH and Allah cannot both be the one true God. He said this because this last Wednesday evening I did a presentation for Collegiate …
Sensate Hatred of Nobility
“The ripened sensate mentality of today, seeing human beings as no more than physical objects moved by instincts, reflexes, and drives, virtually disallows any attempt to raise them above the animal level. Genuine heroes are all by banned from literature and all but impossible for authors to create.” (B.G. Brander, Staring Into Chaos, pp. 300-301).
But What If Metaphor Is Ultimate Truth?
“But, at the same time, no one should nervously imagine that this critique of the Enlightenment proceeds from any relativistic postmodern nonsense. The modernist and postmodernist share this one thing in common: They both hold, at bottom, that metaphor is meaningless. The modernist goes off to find meaning somewhere else, suitably formulaic, and the postmodernist …